There Is a Season

There Is a Season (McClelland & Stewart), Patrick Lane’s meditative account of the year after he returned from rehab and the solace he found in his garden, is an honest telling of the past and present life of a husband, teacher, alcoholic, drug addict, poet and gardener. Lane doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable or the unsavoury: the empty liquor bottles he finds stashed away in the garden, the dead toddler he found at the dump when he was a child and never told anyone about. As a reader, I went along with his careful account of the garden life and the comfort it gave him, but for all the meticulous observations, something was missing: Lorna, his wife, who “has suffered my addiction for years,” and in whose arms at night he finds another garden. And I wondered: So many gardens. Where is Lorna’s garden?